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This monograph discloses the estate-based social structure of contemporary Russia by way of outlining the principles of the USSR s peculiar estate system, and explaining the new social estates of post-Soviet Russia. Simon Kordonsky distinguishes and describes in particular the currently existing Russian service and support estates. He introduces the notions of a resource-based state and resource-based economy as the political and economic foundations for Russian society´s estate structure. His study demonstrates, moreover, how the method of inventing and institutionalizing threats plays a dominant role in the mode of distribution of scarce resources in such a social system.
The book shows fundamental differences between resource- as well as threat-based economies, on the one side, and traditional risk-based economies, on the other, and discloses what this means for Russia´s future.

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Dr. Simon G. Kordonsky is Professor of Public Policy as well as Head of the Department of Local Self-Government and of the Laboratory for Municipal Administration at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Kordonsky studied biology at Tomsk State University and worked previously as a researcher at Altai State University as well as the Russian Presidential Administration. He is the author of five Russian monographs and has published papers in, among other journals, Osteuropa, Strategic & Business Intelligence, Otechestvennye zapiski, Mir Rossii, Vek XX i mir, Kentavr, and Mikroekonomika. Kordonsky is also member of the editorial boards of the journals Voprosy obrazovaniia and Voprosy gosudarstvennogo i munitsipal´nogo upravleniia, as well as Chairman of the Expert Council of the Khamovniki Foundation for Social Research (www.khamovniky.ru). The author of the foreword: Dr. Svetlana Barsukova is Professor of Economic Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

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